I sipped my drink. ‘The practice is still well spoken of.’
‘But if it’s only that … It’s such a silly reason for–’
‘For what?’
She said: ‘I don’t want to break up your marriage.’
I stared back at her, genuinely surprised. ‘You couldn’t,’ I told her. Then I felt that I might soften this. ‘I mean, it’s not that kind of–’
‘I know what you meant,’ she said, interrupting me for perhaps the very first time since I met her. ‘But even if I couldn’t break it up, this sort of situation could. And it’s not worth it. I
know
. That kind of thing never is.’
‘Not worth what?’ It seemed a good moment to be obtuse, and the effort involved was negligible.
‘Not worth breaking up a marriage like yours.’
‘Do tell me more.’
‘I wish you’d help me,’ she said, ‘instead of joking and pretending.’
I had to resist this impertinence. ‘I’m not doing either,’ I said roughly. ‘Not that you could tell the difference … What do you mean, a marriage like mine?’
‘I mean,’ said Susan, serious and intent, ‘that you still love her very much. There’s not such a lot of that around. You should never throw it away.’
I had to think about that for a bit, before deciding how to answer it. For some reason, it seemed first and foremost a blatant intrusion; Susan simply was not licensed to operate in this area; her expertise was confined to smaller matters altogether. It would be better, I thought presently, to work her back towards her own ground; I wasn’t equipped, neither on this evening nor on any average evening during my present lousy half-life of pressure and counter-pressure, to deal with inquisitive fingers from the nursery-wing of affairs.
But before I shoved her back into bed, a smart slap on her shapely ego would not do either of us any harm … I lay back, and looked at her over the rim of my glass, and asked: ‘How did you arrive at that acute analysis?’
She met my glance, rather hopelessly, and said: ‘I knew this wasn’t any good.’
‘You’re god-damned right it’s not any good! I’ve never heard such a load of crap in all my life.’ It was not a moment for delicacy. ‘Love has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about. There isn’t any love in the whole world. There’s sex, and there’s habit, and there’s phoney emotion, and there’s greed, and these are the ties that bind …’ I pointed my finger at her, not too badly aimed. ‘Now you want us to stop, because of–’ I had almost forgotten, ‘–because of what?’
‘Because you’re still in love with your wife.’ She had never said ‘Kate’, nor, come to think of it, had I. ‘It’s too good to be spoilt.’
‘Just how did you work that out?’
She was being rather brave – the most annoying trait in any woman. ‘It’s obvious, in everything you do these days.’
‘It won’t be obvious, in the next thing I do.’ I set my glass down, with no more than a minor crash, and levered myself off the sofa. ‘Come on – let’s go to bed.’
‘Go to bed?’ She sounded more surprised than I had ever heard her.
‘
Go to bed
,’ I mimicked. ‘It’s the thing people do when they want to insert object A into object B, in the interests of cementing their sacred union.’ I had brought this intricate sentence out at a stumbling rush, afraid of pausing. Now I said, more relaxed: ‘Come on, Susan. I’m tired. Let’s get laid.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Johnny. Not tonight. It’s wrong.’
‘What do you mean, wrong?’ I was near to her now, for what I hoped would be a brief stop on the smooth, well-worn pathway to the semi-conjugal mattress. Except for the overcooked hair, she still looked beautiful. I was sure that I could manage it.
‘It’s wrong when people are quarrelling.’
‘We’re not quarrelling. We’re reviewing current topics.’
‘It would be wrong, all the same.’
I started to argue, then to wrestle, which was ineffective, then to argue again. Sometimes, in the past, it had been her availability which had vaguely annoyed me. (‘Just pour hot water on that girl,’ I had thought once, in Barbados, when she was briefly under the shower before our fourth bout of the day, ‘and you get Instant Screw.’) Now it was her refusal, perverse, unaccountable, against all accepted regulations. By God, one might have supposed that she had a mind of her own … And what had happened to gratitude?
The wrestling match, verbal and physical, took some time and covered all sorts of territory, from the sofa in the sitting room to the very front doorstep of love; but in the end she said yes, and stripped and bathed, as I did, and lay down upon our long-established workbench, dutifully composed, undeniably good to look at.
It seemed that I had won my argument which, in these hard times, was quite a change. But it turned out that I might as well have saved my breath.
Long ago, Eumor, an older man, used to use the words: ‘It won’t travel,’ or some such phrase, to indicate a sad decline of his potency, in any pause between impetuous wooing and actual achievement. ‘Sometimes I fear even to get out of the car,’ he had once said, posing a serious problem in logistics. ‘And if she keeps me waiting in the bathroom …’ I had sympathised, though feeling superior; but now, for the first time, it was happening to me, and I was not superior any longer. I was livid.
I did my best, as a man must, but there seemed to be too many things against me. Drink had taken its toll; I had spent too much time and energy arguing; I had had a period of disliking her, and the sudden switch to amorous intent failed to pull the rest of the equipment with it. My body lagged, even as I tried to whip it into some kind of shape.
Susan did her best for me, and she was as beautiful and alive as ever. But something beyond lively beauty was betraying me. For all the talk, I did not want her enough to be able to take her.
Sweating, impotent – the gross and wounding word had to be used – I lay back in the tumbled bed, and thought of ways and means. There were none. Something really had gone wrong. Perhaps it was the bed itself, which seemed grubby and stale, the sour graveyard of a battle never joined, recalling too clearly the rank disorder of our lives. Perhaps it was something I deserved.
Perhaps this was, as she had said, the end of the line.
I did not like that thought at all, and I tried once more, with a desperate, bruising intensity which made no gain of any sort. The times were out of joint, and a lot else besides.
Have you prayed tonight
,
Desdemona
? I thought, as I sought entrance to that ravishing body; and did you pray for this – and where is this, for God’s sake?
Gone to graveyards everywhere.
‘Why not just go to sleep?’ Susan said presently. ‘You’re tired.’
‘I’m not tired,’ I mumbled, face in the pillow. ‘I’m just no good tonight, that’s all. I must have trod on a bad oyster.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It should.’
Perhaps there was a term to adultery, as there was a term to marriage, and it was shorter, and I had found it. Our affair had been fun, as she had said; but now it had become nothing – it was the garbage of love, which had started to smell before it started to evaporate.
Between drowsing and thinking, between feeling sad and feeling a damned fool, between wanting another drink and wanting to throw up, I felt her stirring beside me. I wondered how it had been for her, pestered and sought after one minute, left vacant the next. If I were cast down, she was presumably still up in the air. There wasn’t a thing I could do about that, either.
Of course, I might joke it up a little.
‘The Sultan had nine wives,’ I said, in the same anonymous mumble, ‘and eight of them had it pretty soft.’
‘All right, Johnny,’ she said, in a small, cool voice. ‘Let’s say good night. I have to work in the morning.’
‘I’ll say good night,’ I said, ‘and I’ll sing the lullaby too. Let me tell you some more bad jokes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been wanting to use them for a long time, but I don’t get many chances, so I store them up on the last page of my manuscript book … They’re the writer’s end product, and you know what that is … Do you know who was the most elastic man in the Bible? Ananias – he tied his ass to a tree, and walked into Jerusalem … I heard that one at school,’ I said, ‘and it was terribly daring even then … And did you know how they found out about Oscar Wilde? It was at a party, and someone asked where he was, and the butler said: “He’s upstairs, feeling a little queer.” And did you hear about the blind prostitute? You’ve got to hand it to her.’
‘Time to go to sleep, Johnny,’ said Susan.
‘
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
,’ I said. ‘
Sleep
,
twin brother of death
… There’s another rather funny story about Oscar Wilde. It happened at his trial. He produced a character witness, an officer in some regiment or other. And the officer, who wasn’t too bright, said, absolutely straight-faced: “I am convinced that Mr Wilde is a man of honour and integrity. Why, I would trust him with my own sister!”’
‘So?’ said Susan.
‘So nothing! It’s just a story. And don’t think I’m anti-Wilde. I don’t mind what he did. He could poke a canary to make it sing, as far as I’m concerned. He was a man of enormous talent, and that pays for everything. Like Maria Callas.’
‘Maria Callas?’
‘Maria Callas. The other kind of canary. Charged by many observers with much too much
prima donna
activity. What on earth does it matter, as long as she sings like an angel. Which she does, unfailingly … You’ve got to make allowances for people who have it.’
‘Have what?’
‘The spark … Sometimes I wish … I’m starting a new book tomorrow,’ I told her, in all drunken seriousness. ‘Something for the kiddies. It’s called
A Child’s Garden of Thalidomide
. Or else I’m going to start a new magazine. It’s aimed at where all the heavy money is, so it’s got to be called
Modern Widow
… Sometimes you can make up good names for new firms. There ought to be an ambulance business called the Sick Transit Company. And then there’s my new marina, to bring in the LP set. Let’s see if I can pronounce it properly. It’s called the Ludwig Vann Boat Haven. Very difficult, very classical …’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Susan.
‘Forgive us,’ I said. ‘We are of humble origin.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Christ, don’t you know anything?’ I was sick of people who didn’t know anything; they were worse than the ones who knew everything. ‘It’s in
The Brothers Karamazov
, or maybe
Crime and Punishment
. Those are books … Therewas this captain – Captain Popoff, or Captain Pullizpantsoff, or something. He was a ranker, and he married a peasant woman who was always dropping social clangers, or spilling the samovar, or making idiotic remarks at parties. So whenever she did something particularly stupid, the captain would say: “Forgive us, we are of humble origin.” Thus putting everyone at their ease.’
‘Goodnight, Johnny,’ said Susan.
‘Lucky you,’ I said. ‘Nothing on your mind … I was a drop-out for the FBI … Actually, when I was your age, I had a wonderful job. Stud groom at an elephant farm. The pay was lousy, but the tips were terrific.’
‘Johnny, I’ve
got
to sleep.’
‘People miss the point all the time. Like Oscar Wilde’s character witness. Do you remember Lee Bum Suk?’
‘Johnny,’ said Susan. ‘For heaven’s sake?’
‘Oh, he was a real man. Foreign Minister of North Korea, or something like that. But you’ve got to agree that it’s an odd name. And we – that’s the good guys – felt we had to point the fact out. Lee Bum Suk, we said. Ha, ha, ha! Not so! said the Chinese newspapers. This is a foul capitalist slander, a typical revisionist lie. As all the civilised world knows, his name is actually Bum Suk Lee.’
‘Sleep, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Sleep, sleep. Please!’
I also was sleepy now, drowning out on a muddy, fouled-up stream-of-consciousness routine which, as they used to say on the music-halls when the tuba blew a rude note, was better out than in. But I still had a few left, with a little dredging. I might be no good to her, but, like the man in the hardware store, I could still talk a good screw, any day of the night.
‘The motto of the Gordon Highlanders in France,’ I said, ‘was “Up kilts and at ’em!” And let me take you to the land of the nursery rhyme.’ I gave it the light tenor treatment:
‘Oh, have you met my daughter, sir?
She can’t control her water, sir;
And every time she laughs, she pees –
Don’t make her laugh, sir, please sir, please!
Oh damn you, there it goes again,
A-trickling down her knees.’
‘Johnny,’ said Susan, ‘just give it a rest.’
‘Shall I sing you an old German raping song?’
‘No.’
‘Or my latest twelve-tone composition ‘Ecstatic Variations on a Theme by Me?’
‘No. Go to sleep. Or go away.’
‘Spoken like a true virgin. Oh yes, virginity. Virginity is the only realm where a girl will boast of her ignorance. Well, that
used
to be true. Now they seem to have taken the bit between their legs … Drives women mad – smells like money – that’s my aftershave lotion … And I’ve just remembered a story about a public lavatory in England. The chaps had been behaving very badly there – boring holes in the partitions, doing all sorts of naughty things to each other, committing sodomy every time they pulled the chain. So the authorities raided the place, and the policeman giving evidence said to the magistrate: “There were some absolutely filthy things going on, sir. In fact, when someone came in for a good honest crap, it was like a breath of fresh air.” That’s a true story.’
Susan didn’t like true stories, presumably, because I didn’t get any answer to this last contribution. My head had started to ache, and my mouth felt dry, which was a funny thing for it to feel after so much had been poured down it. There seemed to be a lot of traffic down on 54th Street; car doors slamming, and once someone running, like me. The rumpled bed felt like a corrugated sweat-box. I was going to have a hard time getting to sleep.